Song of Cicadas
by Pipe Fox
Summary: Tokyo summers seem to get warmer each year. Whether you're shaded under a peach tree or out on the beach, the sun presses down and soaks into every inch of you. But nothing, it seems, is so suffocating as one's own adolescence.
1. Portrait of a Young Man in Summer

Song of Cicadas

Song of Cicadas

I.

Portrait of a Young Man in Summer

Each year, when summer passes through Tokyo, the temperature seems to rise higher than the year before. In reality, no summer has been significantly hotter than any other in at least two decades. But each year, it is sweltering nonetheless.

I remember the torture of those first weeks in July, right before the start of summer vacation. Classes would drag, lengthening across the days like mercury in a thermometer, until eventually they ran together. Really, I don't remember much, except a few things, like that day in July.

A breeze had come in from the east, and with it came clouds and the scent of the ocean. I was stir-crazy that year; at lunch, I would catch some fresh air on the roof just to make it through the rest of the day. Somehow though, I always fell asleep. It happened a few times. That day, Hikari had come snooping around as she often did, but said little except for her lectures, which had also become her custom.

Strange how clear that memory is.

"It's the third time already." Hikari leaned back in the shade, pausing to bite the white flesh of her peach. By then it was the middle of the fruit's season, but the peaches were still tart. I was tossing a dry pit idly between two hands.

"Are you lecturing me?"

"They'll call you in if it happens again."

I closed my eyes. "So they'll call me in."

"You're awful cheeky." She sighed, letting the half-eaten peach rest carelessly against her uniform skirt. The juice began to stain. "July is so long in the start."

I murmured my assent.

Overhead, thin gray clouds rolled leniently over the blue sky like waves, casting shadows on the rooftop. She draped her peach hand over her eyes, looking upward, and watching the clouds I could see her in the corner of my eye. Hikari looked younger than the rest of the class. She swore it was because her eyes were too big and dark, but maybe it was something in her air too.

I don't know what we were about then. I don't know if I started to love her afterwards, or if I had for a while, or whether it was an on-season or off-season for us. Maybe it was just summer and I was just some eager seventeen-year-old. Probably. I meant to pull down her thin, tan wrist and kiss it just for the hell of it, but I grabbed the peach instead and took a bite. She frowned, reddening slightly. I expected another reprimand, like she could reach my thoughts, but instead she said,

"My parents have a timeshare at Shibukawa Beach. Wanna go?"

"Shibukawa?" I sounded dubious, I knew. There was a rumble of thunder from the clouds which, as if in seconds only, seemed thicker and more menacing. "Like an overnight trip?"

She bit the peach and didn't answer. I still didn't believe what she was saying.

"Why don't you ask Nagase or Ijiri?"

"I'm asking you."

So I shrugged. "We'll see."

There was a second or two of silence, then the half-eaten peach dropped into my lap.

"Idiot."

I wasn't sure if I had offended her until the affirmative slam of the roof door cleared any misconceptions. I finished what was left of the peach. Then I closed my eyes again, leaning into the wall where above him, the clouds darkened and growled.

But no rain fell.

School let out for vacation a week later, and Hikari was still mad at me. I could tell because she wouldn't say my name. It's just something strange that she had always done. She had to nudge me when she wanted to talk, or clear her throat loudly, and in discussions with her friends she would make confusing, nameless references. Classic Hikari.

At the end of the school day, between the lockers and the front door, she pushed the back of my shoulder blade to get my attention. I smirked when I saw her. That was probably a mistake, because she immediately frowned.

"Have you thought more about Shibukawa?"

That caught me off guard. I'd been thinking about it a lot, about the possible "us", and what an over-night trip meant to most people. Trouble was, Hikari wasn't most people. She had a habit of doing things without questioning her motives, then acted surprised when people told her their expectations.

I didn't feel like explaining to her what everyone would think if we went to Shibukawa together.

So I lied. "No, not really. I didn't think you were serious."

Another mistake. She bit her lip and walked past me. I fought with myself a little bit about it. She'd probably stay mad at me if I didn't make it up, somehow. And fast.

I called out to her. "Hang on a sec. What days did you want to go?"

At first I thought she hadn't heard me. But eventually she turned around.

"The last week in August is the only opening."

"Last week in August." I said. "Okay."

She actually smiled. "See you later, Takeru."

I grinned back. All of this was unnecessary theatrics, of course. We see each other nearly every day in summer, since we don't live that far apart and typically do our summer homework together. But high school is all unnecessary theatrics anyway.

Later that night, Hikari called and told me the reservation was from August 21st to the 22nd, exactly two days before the start of fall quarter. She sounded really excited, and I didn't have the heart to ask her where we were staying, or how many rooms there were. Well, that's not entirely true. I just didn't know how.

I saw her the next day, and the day after that. We found summer jobs that weren't far from each other, and on our days we worked on our homework, or went to the beach. I never found the word to ask her what was going to happen in August, and she never mentioned it. A friend of mine told me it's not really the guy's job to think about that kind of thing anyway. So I closed my eyes and didn't think about it anymore.

I won't say that I was apprehensive, because I'm not weak. But subconsciously, maybe, I wished for July to last a little bit longer.

End of Part I.

Alright, so technically I should be working on Heavenly Deadly. But I figured I'd take a break because…uh, I don't know, I just wanted to take a break. School is kicking my creativity's ass. Apparently I can only write Takari at this point. It's sort of disappointing, because I wanted to write something lighthearted and I still ended up on the mellow side. It's the symbolism, I swear. Oh wells.

Incidentally, summer vacation in Japan apparently starts somewhere around July 20th and ends near the end of August, BUT it's in the middle of the school year. You may be staring at the screen right now like, "Well, yeah. Duh." But on the off-chance that you're not, there you go.

If you made it this far, you're a real trooper! Thanks so much.

P.S. This will be short, three parts max. I'm trying to finish it in a timely manner so I can get back to what I'm supposed to be doing. We'll see how well this goes. Thanks again.


	2. Momotaro

Song of Cicadas

II.

Momotaro

Once upon a time, there lived an old, childless couple in the country of Okayama. Each day, the husband went into the forest to chop wood, and the wife went down to the river to wash clothes. One day as she did the washing, she spotted a gigantic white peach floating down the river. As it came upon her, she scooped it up in her arms and lifted it from the water.

"What a delicious looking peach!" She said. "I will take it home and share it with my husband."

That night, when her husband came home from chopping wood, he saw the gigantic peach his wife had found and together they admired its beauty.

"Cut it open." He said. "I'd love a taste."

The wife took a sharp knife and sliced the peach round. But when they pried it open, there was no peach stone, but a beautiful baby boy curled inside. They named him Momotaro, peach boy, and he grew up strong and bright…

That's not really what happened, but I'll stop there anyway and tell you a different story.

The peaches sweetened and the rains stopped, and July stretched on, then August came. Time passes quickly, and I had almost forgotten about Shibukawa. Almost.

I was nervous, of course. I was nervous when I first mentioned it to Takeru before school ended. July was agony. I don't know if there was something peculiar in the air, but from the very beginning of summer the world had started to change. Miyako called me urgently, asked me to come with her to the convenience store to buy a pregnancy test. That caught me off-guard. It had never occurred to me that she and Ken were that…intimate. Maybe I'd subconsciously turned a blind eye to all of it.

Three days later, both of my best friends told me they'd lost their virginity. There was no candidness about it, no ceremony; we'd always talked about it sparingly, and then with little detail, like the music we wanted playing, maybe, and the things we'd want him to say. But this, all of it, just _happened_, and within days they began to look at me piteously, as if there was no one to love me at all.

That drove me crazy.

At the beginning of high school, I'd been the one with the most experience, the one who could look upon the other girls and shake her head, and reassure her that she'd land a boyfriend in no time. I can't say I'd never had the opportunity to have sex, because I'd dated quite a few boys by then and several of them were older. I don't know why I didn't do it, exactly. I can't put it into exact words. It just never felt like the right time. I mean, it didn't matter who it was, something was always off. And now that I was a senior and ready, anxious, to take that next step, I was between boyfriends and wasn't interested in anyone.

Well, that's not true. There was Takeru, faithful and sweet Takeru who just within the last year, it seemed, had grown taller and more handsome—at least that's what everyone said. Before that year, I could barely recall whether he was seven or seventeen when I looked at him. But by July, he'd become a man, suddenly, as boys often do, incumbent of his brother's charm, his cool handsomeness. But there was a sincerity in his expression he had not inherited from Yamato. I watched him in class to pass the time, his long, lean arms draped over the desk like hothouse vines, his eyes pressed up against the windows that would, without warning, turn suddenly and catch in mine. It was about that time that I decided I wanted Takeru to be my first, and just as quickly as I had decided it, I had thought up a plan, and that was that.

But by August, that wasn't exactly that anymore. I saw Takeru nearly everyday, and nearly every day he acted a little stranger than before. A little more reserved, I guess, conscious of himself and me, conscious of our distance and the jokes we made, of the way I touched his shoulder to make a point and how he pulled quickly away, as if I were hot as coals. All of these little things began to make me wonder, to search our extensive history for any sort of clue. And I remembered in junior year that girl he had dated briefly, a freshman with an overbite and pale, pale skin, who went around telling everyone they'd gone all the way and that he'd already told her he loved her. They broke up pretty soon after that.

Takeru went out of his way to tell me it wasn't true and I went out of my way to tell him I didn't care, since I was dating a senior at the time and "things might get more serious." That wasn't true either; things weren't going to get more serious and I had been incredibly jealous, though I couldn't bear to think why. Ever since the beginning of high school, it had been too confusing between us. We'd fooled around more than once, twice at school even, but neither of us ever brought it up afterwards and things always went back to normal.

After I'd asked him to Shibukawa though, things weren't going back to normal, not yet. And I was worried when the day finally came, and we met in the morning at the seaside park outside of the station.

He walked up carrying a large backpack, and his face seemed a little flushed, as though he'd jogged to meet me.

"Morning." He said, sighing out the last of his breathlessness. "Ready to go?"

I nodded and followed him towards the train station. My heart was thumping a million beats a minute.

"Why'd you want to meet at the beach?"

"I don't know." I managed. In truth, I think a small part of me wanted to see him in the crisp, ocean air before it got too warm outside, but I hadn't thought about it at the time.

We made it to the train a little after eight and arrived in Okayama a little after noon, then took a leisurely train into Tamano City. During that time, we chatted idly and joked and took pictures of the passing scenery. I realized I had been foolish to worry. After some directional challenges, we found the inn where my parents owned the time share, a Japanese-style room in an otherwise Western hotel, with windows that overlooked the coastline. I watched Takeru's face upon seeing the single futon folded in the closet. It was impassive.

On the dresser, there was a bowl of white peaches. I could smell them from the door. Takeru crossed the room to set his backpack on the floor, his hands digging into the bowl, it seemed, before he had time to do anything else. He took a pocket knife out of his back pocket and began to carve it, slowly, in half. When it was cut all the way across, he held it between his palms and asked,

"Which half do you want?"

I pointed to the left half. He pulled the peach apart; the stone was wedged in the center of my hemisphere. He handed it to me, smiling. "Make a wish."

"Nobody wishes on peach pits." I said.

I had signed up for a tour that would take us all the way to Okayama City and Kibitsu, but there were some mechanical errors and we were rescheduled to the next day. With no alternative plans, we decided to go to the beach. It was burning up. We weren't embarrassed to undress beside each other, our backs facing in the small room. We poured the peaches in the beach bag and left the inn, walking quickly across the blistering asphalt and down into the shade of black pine trees. The beach, stretching wide and white before us, was crowded with tourists. We wandered to the farthest edge of the shore where the rocks began to climb out of the sand and lay ourselves down there. It was too hot though, and within a few hours we ambled back into town.

Takeru wanted kibi-dango and insisted we stop at a stand in the park to eat some. He ordered three of the sweet millet dumplings for each of us and we sat on a nearby bench to enjoy them.

"This is nice." He said. I looked up unexpectedly between bites.

Takeru nodded to himself as if to affirm his own statement. "I wish summer would last forever."

"It's too hot." I said softly, leaning back. The bench pressed uncomfortably into my shoulder blades and I realized I was probably sunburnt. I sighed, folding the empty dumpling carton in my hands.

Takeru let his hand rest deliberately on top of mine. I inhaled sharply, instantly wishing to take the breath back, but he didn't say anything and he didn't move. He wasn't watching me. His eyes were fixed on the peak of Ojigadake, rising through the bright evening like the shoulders of a sloping forest giant.

I felt my heart catch. I wanted to take in the serenity of that moment like he was taking it in, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from him. The gentle weight of his hand pressing over mine had immobilized me, and the air was shifting again, pushing us in all sorts of directions at once. I got so dizzy suddenly that I wanted to lie down and close my eyes. But he held me there, his presence an anchor to my spinning dream.

He said, "To be young forever is impossible, right?"

He almost laughed, and finally his eyes turned to me, warm and clear and blue, and all of my dizziness and confusion slipped away as we arrived at our new destination. It was like we'd all of the sudden jumped through a threshold into a separate room, and I couldn't remember where we'd been in the first place.

"_Mono no aware._" The sensitivity of things; appreciating the beauty of transience.

It was ending. But what _it_ was, I didn't know.

We left the park, and by the time we found our way back to the inn the day had set into balmy night. We ate dinner at the inn, a small array of local specialties. The waiter somehow got it into his head that we were newly-weds and brought a little ceramic flask of cold saké with his compliments, so we drank that too. Between the sun in the afternoon and the saké in the evening, we were tired and a bit giddy. We charged the dinner to the room and wandered upstairs, laughing about the waiter and the beach and Momotaro and anything that came to mind.

When I opened the door, the sight of the single futon laid in the center of the room brought me back to reality. I could feel his eyes watching it too, over my shoulder. But he pushed past me and sat on the floor, leaning all the way back to his elbows.

"I think ate too much." He said.

"You didn't eat that much." I said. His eyes followed me as I opened the windows. Then I sat across from him on a stray cushion. There was an uncomfortable silence, then he lay on his back.

"Don't fall asleep." I said quickly, then swallowed, choosing words carefully, "It's only nine o' clock. You'll wake up too early."

"I feel tired." He said simply, and didn't open his eyes.

I frowned hopelessly, fighting the automatic compulsion to reach for the phone and call for another futon. Instead, I saw the beach bag lying beside the small end table, still brimming with white peaches. I reached over and dug one out.

"Ne, Takeru. Let me see your pocket knife."

He sat up slowly, then reached into his pocket and lent it to me. I struggled to cut the peach in half. He smirked in the corner of my eye. "Careful you don't cut the baby." He said.

"Do you really think Momotaro is inside?" I asked half-heartedly, finally bringing the cut round. He shrugged.

"Which half do you want?"

He pointed to the right. I pried the peach open and handed it to him. The pit was in the right side.

"What will you wish for?" I asked, a little sarcastically. He took a bite, smiling over its glistening flesh. Then he lay on his back again, as flat and smooth as a beach stone.

"Can't tell you." He said.

"Meanie." I spat back, chewing the pitless half. There was more silence, so I said the first thing that popped into my head. "You know that's not really what happened."

"What?"

"Momotaro." I said. "The couple didn't find him inside the peach."

He sat up on his elbows again. "The old woman found him in a giant peach as it floated down the river."

"Wrong, wrong. The old woman did find a giant peach, but that's not what happened."

Takeru frowned skeptically. I leaned forward a little bit. "The old woman found the peach in the river and brought it home. It looked so delicious that she decided to have a little taste before her husband came home.

"When she did, she felt all of her wrinkles disappearing and her hair growing long and black, and she realized that the magical peach had changed her back into a young woman. Later that night, her husband comes home and he sees a beautiful young woman who says she's his wife. She makes him take a bite, and he becomes a young man, and with their youth and energy restored, they…"

The story trailed off awkwardly. Takeru took a moment to absorb the whole thing, then smiled goofily.

"That's definitely not the version I heard."

I took another bite of the peach. "They obviously don't teach it in school."

He finished his half in three more bites and lay on his back again, the pit clutched in his hand.

"Don't fall asleep!" I said insistently. He smiled and closed his eyes.

I stood up indignantly. "If you're going to sleep, then I'm going to sleep, too." He didn't say anything. I marched to the door and turned off the lights.

Except for the moon, out of sight from the window but whose light cast thin shadows across the room. I lay down on the futon without changing, still sandy and sunburnt from the beach. Then, with maybe a minute's hesitation, I heard Takeru come and sit beside me. In another minute, his long legs had stretched out behind me and he laid his hand on my shoulder. I was turned towards the window and could only feel him lie there, curled against me. My heart kicked against my chest when he gently, gently, put his mouth against my burnt shoulder blades.

We lay there for minutes, or hours, I couldn't tell. The silence was agony. I was getting tired but with him so close to me, I couldn't fall asleep.

Then, through the darkness, he whispered,

"Hikari, are you awake?"

It took every bit of courage to turn around. His eyes were bright and his expression was unreadable.

"I'm awake." I said.

He touched my face, and silently we kissed.

It wasn't what I thought it would be. I had always said that I wanted my first time to be on a rainy night, with soft music playing, maybe, and a single candle lighting the whole room. I had entertained the idea of it being with a foreigner who had a strange, beautiful accent, and could tell me how much he loved me in several different languages.

It was different. There was no ceremony, no rain or candlelight. The Okayama air was warm and sticky. There was sand in his hair and in mine; we were both nervous and clumsy. I couldn't even be sure if I loved him the way I had thought you were supposed to love someone when you sleep with them for the first time.

But these are all things I realized after. At the time, as he lie on top of me and put his mouth between mine, my only thoughts were that his kisses felt good and familiar, and that he tasted like peaches.

End of Part II.

I was actually tempted to go into details, but I decided that for the integrity of the story I probably shouldn't. Let's see, info, info…

Ah yes. Momotaro is a Japanese folktale that originates from Okayama, about an old childless couple who find a boy in a peach (or, in the earlier versions, about a magical peach that gives an old childless couple their youth and vitality back and, uh, well, you get the idea). They name the boy Momotaro, which means 'peach boy', and he goes off and conquers the terrifying ogres who live on an island and make the townspeople unhappy. It's more complicated than that, but…eh…

Kibi-dango are sweet dumplings made from millet, a regional specialty.

_Mono no aware_ (mo-no no a-wa-rey), 物の哀れ, means "the pathos of things" or "the sensitivity of things". It's the concept of appreciating something beautiful because it won't be beautiful forever, like cherry blossoms or sunsets and tattoos, kind of. It's a very bittersweet idea.

There's one more chapter left after this. I don't have very much to say for myself, so…yes. Thanks for reading.


	3. Song of Cicadas

Song of Cicadas

III.

The Song of Cicadas

The end of summer, not unlike the beginning, comes with the song of cicadas. Like a low string orchestra echoing unseen in the trees, when suddenly, one mournful voice rises above the rest, sings, dies away. I think it's the saddest sound I've ever heard.

That morning, we lay beside each other unsleeping in the faint daylight. The dull and distant roar of the ocean mixed with the echo of raindrops on the windows; it had been showering lightly for hours, and the warm wet air seeped in through the open window, sticking to everything it touched.

Our clothes were in a sandy heap beside the futon. Hikari lay uncovered, strangely brazen and forcibly unembarrassed by her nakedness. I ruminated over the slender lines of her body. There was something familiar about her, smooth and freckled by the sun like a brown egg; it was like I'd seen her before though I knew I'd never seen her before. She stared back at me.

Then she asked the question I'd been thinking about all morning.

"Did you sleep with your ex-girlfriend?" I wet my mouth.

Everything outside of the room, all the things that happened before or would happen later, seemed very far away. But even through the haze I remembered Nozomi, blurred like the memory of a dream. My stomach twisted.

Then I nodded, and everything turned real again. "Mm."

I felt light-headed and lay back, counting the tiles of the acoustic ceiling. She didn't move a muscle beside me. I listened to her even breath, so quiet but so loud. I thought maybe the showers had stopped, but still the raindrops plodded against the window like thousands of tiny feet. Just as I thought she might have fallen back asleep, she asked,

"Why did you say you didn't?"

A lump rose in my throat.

"Who knows." I said, hoping that would be the end of it, but she lay her fingers over my wrist and squeezed her nails against the bone.

"_You_ know." She said. "Why?"

It was suddenly too bright, so I covered my eyes. Her fingernails dug into my wrist; I could feel little red indents rising against them. "I don't know. I thought it would be better if everything were just the same, for us…I mean, if what we had never changed."

She let go of my wrist. I wished she hadn't. In the corner of my eye, I chanced a glance at her. She was staring at the ceiling, and without warning and without a sound, she started crying. I felt a sick panic overcome me. I turned over and drew her into me. Her body stiffened, resisted, but when she did finally look at me, her dark eyes wet and round, framed by sticking black lashes, I realized I would have done anything right then to make her stop crying. I would have slashed my wrists. I would have jumped out of the window.

"Please don't cry." I begged. "I'm sorry I lied. Please, I'm so stupid…"

I kissed her and she kissed back, the bridge of her nose damp as it passed by mine, her arms curling around my neck, our hearts hammering through our skin.

"I'm sorry, I'm stupid…"

I didn't know what I was saying. I didn't know why I was stupid then; I only knew that I was, and that I had hurt Hikari, but I didn't know why. I had seen Hikari cry before, and I had seen her cry because of me before. But it wasn't the same. She wasn't hurt or angry. She looked…lost.

Hikari is never someone I would call helpless. Not since grade school, when she would turn to Taichi at every troubled moment, has the word even cross my mind. That Hikari had been gone a long time. She'd grown into independence; she'd become spirited and dynamic and sure of her own feet. To see her old self resurface, all the fragility and incertitude bubbling to the top in front of me, I couldn't handle it. I was scared and I wasn't ashamed of my fear. Those eyes stuck with me as we kissed, and I thought: if I told her I loved her, would that make it okay?

I broke away, still close enough to see the nuances of her flushed face, her mouth slightly open and her eyes still damp. "Hikari…"

But I couldn't say it. True or false, either was too terrible to imagine.

So I closed my eyes and I kissed her again, and we made love a second time in the humid morning.

Somehow, we got up –somehow, because I've never been able to recall the exact transition between the futon to the shower and finally, to the train –but we had already missed the tour. We decided to go back to the city. She leaned on my shoulder the ride there, absolutely silent. I would have thought she was sleeping, except her fingertips were tapping a song I knew into the side of my palm, and she hummed notes from it under her breath.

In the city, we followed a map to the castle. It was tall and black, like stacked bento. We paid and looked at the accompanying museum, but it was still a little too warm for reading, so we started instead toward Korakuen Garden. Crossing the bridge toward the riverbank, Hikari walked behind me—I imagined she was looking back at the castle, built up by rough, round stones. Then I felt, almost unconsciously, my hand reach for hers. I didn't want to look at her because, I don't know, I didn't want to ask for it. But she took it with both of her petite hands and I didn't look at her at all as we continued down the path into gardens. Only when we were out of the shadow of the climbing trees did I turn back. She was looking at me, smiling.

We spent most of the daytrip in the garden. Hikari had brought her parents' Polaroid, and spent minutes at a time carefully lining up shots. By the time she had used all of her pictures up, we didn't have time for lunch. There was a McDonald's right near the station—we ate there then jumped on the five o' clock train back to Tokyo.

Unlike the ride down, which was loud and talkative, this one was quiet. We watched the scenery flickering by, absorbing nothing of it, like watching a movie in fast-forward. The sun set over flat green fields and canals, small suburban apartments, and zipping through Nagoya, Hikari gripped my hand as fireworks flashed over the city.

"Pretty…" She said.

Our idle hands stayed like that, encircled in one another. She leaned her head on my shoulder again but this time without any little songs, and her even breathing told me she had fallen asleep. I watched her through the side of my eyes, trying to fall asleep myself, but I was thinking about too many things. I thought about that morning and the terrible panic I'd felt. I wondered where that had come from. And I wondered why I had lied about Nozomi, and most importantly, why I couldn't tell Hikari I loved her, like I had wanted to.

Or had I wanted to?

Her sleeping sigh, her small hands. I felt my heart shiver in my chest. It was sort of involuntary what happened next. I wet my mouth and leaned my head to the side, into her hair more than her ear. And I said,

"I love you. I would die for you."

My throat constricted as I realized what I had just done. Remembering now, I don't know why I was so terrified. She didn't stir, not immediately, then she looked up at me, her dark doe eyes watery, and the edge of sleep on her voice.

"Hm?" She asked placidly.

My throat was still tight and my heart was still shaking.

"Oh, nothing." I managed. I thought it sounded convincing, but the look she gave me, just a second too long, suggested otherwise. She touched her head on my shoulder once more and said nothing else, but I knew she was awake now and thinking.

I hated myself then, and I don't think I've ever hated myself more than I did from that day to now. We rode the rest of the train in silence, and even walked, after we disembarked in the warm night, without saying a word. When it came to the halfway point between her apartment complex and mine, she took the camera bag I had been carrying on my shoulder and smiled very slightly.

"I had fun." She said. "Thank you."

There were too many things going through my mind that my mouth couldn't understand, so I said, "Mm." And nodded, all the while thinking, _you're such a coward._

Her smile faded a bit, then reechoed as if forced. Then pushing her hair behind her ears, turned and walked in the direction of her apartment. I made myself walk after her.

"Hikari." I called out. She slowed and turned as I jogged to her side. "Listen, I…"

"Oh, that's right." I stood dumbly as she dug into her camera bag, and handed me one of the photos. It was one of the two we had together in the Korakuen Garden, the one a passerby had snapped while I wasn't quite ready—my face looked a bit annoyed, somehow.

"To remember." She said. I brushed her wrist with my hand.

"On the train, I said…" But she wouldn't let me speak. She put her finger to my mouth, smiling in a way I'd seen a few times before. It was the way she smiled when she was talking about something sad that happened a long time ago.

"You can't say it." She said. "Because then it would be real. And it's better, like you said, if it just stayed the same."

I started to shake my head but, with her hands on either side of my face, she stopped me.

"You can't say anything."

I gave up and nodded. The street was empty when she pulled my face down to hers and kissed me, first with our eyes closed, then open as she parted.

I said, "I'll walk you home."

"I'll be fine."

My hand was still around her wrist as she finally stepped out of reach. "See you later."

I walked home feeling sick. My whole body ached, wanting to be near her.

I didn't see her at all until school started couple of days later. She stood chatting with her friends, glancing over at me sparingly and always with a smile edged in nostalgia or sympathy. Takuda knew about the daytrip and asked what came of it.

"I didn't go." I said simply. "Heatstroke."

Days passed and months passed, and eventually the aching faded and nothing had changed, but not really. She came to me in my thoughts, like a spectre. What was she thinking about alone in her room? I wondered why she had planned that trip to Okayama in the first place, and why after all the fuss she made, she wanted to keep it a secret. I wondered why I had listened to her, why I didn't cling onto her tighter and make her…I don't know, make her love me. Or maybe if I had said it in the half-light, when our mouths were parted, sandy and tan; maybe she would have closed her eyes and sighed into my skin, "Me too."

Youth doesn't last. I missed it even while it was still with me. They say that the reason time goes faster when you're older is that each day is a shorter percentage of the total days in your life. Time flew by. We graduated, and I went abroad to a university in New York. It's been years, and I don't see her much anymore. Taichi told me she moved to Europe, that she'd sent postcards from Africa and South America. He said she'd asked after me, too.

The last time I saw her, I had been in the city three years already. It was a summer as hot as any in Tokyo. By chance, I was cutting through the park, killing time before an appointment when I caught her discreetly photographing a couple there. I waited, suddenly breathless, until she turned and saw me. Her smile then was one I had never seen before, and even now, I don't have a name for it or a way to describe it.

"I can't believe you're here." I said.

She said, "I think I knew I'd find you."

We sat on a bench and talked and talked, and when we ran out of things to talk about we sat silent, staring out into the expanse of trees, thin pathways, small, green hills.

Then, tentatively, she slid her hand into mine, as if she were trying to recall a feeling she left long ago. We didn't look at each other. As slowly as she took my hand, she closed her eyes and laid her head on my shoulder, humming a note or two under her breath of a broken song I could no longer remember the name of.

I closed my eyes, too. Somewhere within the trees, amongst the grind of tires and distant city sounds, a country cicada began to sing.

End.

Disclaimer: I don't own Digimon.

I don't know why it's so hard for me to finish anything. BUT, it's done. Thanks for reading.


End file.
